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November 11, 2012

America made right choice

The Norman Transcript

NORMAN — Editor, The Transcript:

Thank you, thank you, blue states of America. You’ve saved the country from a return to the disastrous days of the Bush administration. Regardless of what Romney and Ryan claimed during the recent campaign, a Romney administration would have been Bush redux.

All of Romney’s key advisors, both on the economy and for foreign policy, were Bush retreads. These are the people who were culpable in bringing on the worst recession since the 1930s. On the international scene, none of these neocons was opposed to the Iraq war. An Obama re-election may well have saved the nation from becoming further entangled in the Middle East, perhaps even leading to a military confrontation with Iran.

Now, we’ll hear all about how Obama and the Democrats, to get anything done, will have to compromise. Compromise is good and almost certainly necessary under the proper circumstances. Now is not one of those occasions.

In the past 10-20 years, the Republican party has moved so far to the right that compromising with that extremist group would be tantamount to giving away a critical part of Obama’s victory. Just how bad is it?

In their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein insist that the current climate of acrimony and hyper-partisanship threatens our very system of constitutional democracy.

And the blame for this chaotic and dysfunctional situation is not equally shared, unlike what many folks assume. They argue that one of our major political parties has taken on the role of insurgent outlier: “The Republicans have become ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise ... implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost to society.”

So, Obama, a moderate pragmatic politician, should stand his ground and make the right-wing Republicans in Congress come to him. Obama may even be doing the GOP a favor by helping to pull them closer to the political center.

DAVID R. MORGAN

Norman

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